Reviewing digital asset managment software

I’ve been reading about various digital asset management (DAM) systems recently and decided it was time to try installing some software. There are a number of robust open-source digital library and digital asset management systems, some of them widely used.

Collective Access – “CollectiveAccess is a highly configurable cataloguing tool and web-based application for museums, archives and digital collections. Available free of charge under the GPL open-source license, it requires little to no custom programming to support a variety of metadata standards, external data sources and repositories, as well as most popular media formats. In addition to multilingual cataloguing facilities, it allows publication of this data in the languages of your choice.”

Islandora – “Islandora is an open source framework under development at the Robertson Library at the University of Prince Edward Island. Islandora combines the Drupal and Fedora software applications to create a robust digital asset management system that can be used for any requirement where collaboration and digital data stewardship, for the short and long term, are critical. Additional open source applications are added to the stack to create what we call Solution Packs or Sprouts.”

Razuna – Razuna is an open-source digital asset management system created by Razuna Ltd. The company offers hosting and support services.

ResourceSpace – “ResourceSpace is a web-based, open source digital asset management system which has been designed to give your content creators easy and fast access to print and web ready assets.”

There is a nice list of open-source and proprietary DAM software applications here.

I created a sandbox to install and experiment with some of these open-source DAM applications. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting reviews or mini-tutorials for each program. I don’t manage a server, so I’ll be installing the software through my ISP, but the nuts and bolts are pretty much the same.